Is AI setting unrealistic beauty standards for video games?

A knight with a flowing red cloak strides through a medieval world of castles and forests rendered with highly detailed line work. The advert appears to show a video game with an art style influenced by the ligne claire of Hergé's Tintin art style.

If you download the game you'll find something very different, as the generic-looking logo design at the end of the ad might already have you suspecting. It's another generic pay-to-win guild PVP.

This is one of just many examples popping up on social media, and it's sparked a debate among devs. Aren't AI game adverts counterproductive if they give people unrealistic expectations? And would it actually be possible to make a game that looks like the fake ad?

Is this an achievable art design? from r/IndieDev

'Fake game adverts' aren't a new phenomenon. Anyone who uses X or Facebook will probably have seen animated ads showing art styles and gameplay that don't appear in the games they advertise. AI has just expanded the fiction further, making it quicker and easier for developers to create fake gameplay in any art style without having to animate it themselves.

For some it's baffling. Hasn't everyone realised that the ads are misleading? Don't people delete the game immediately when they realise it looks nothing like what they expected?

It seems the numbers make it worthwhile. Top Heroes: Kingdom Saga, the game advertised above, has been downloaded 10 million times. If only a relatively small proportion of those people play the game and put money into it, the ads are working.

But could developer RiverGame make a game that looks like their ad? Devs are divided.

“The smooth movement is tough. The very long coat would probably be an issue. The rest comes down to a very cohesive colour palette, shading and artstyle and is achievable,” one person comments on the Reddit post above.

Some suggest that a lot of the game could be pre-rendered, but that it wouldn't be possible to animate all of the interactions in a believable way. That would mean a choice between complex intricate art and limited interactions like you see in some hand-drawn 2D games or much simpler assets.

Others think it could be done with toon shading in Godot or Shader Graph in Unity using detailed assets (see our guide to game engines), but then you'd need a big team of artists and animators, and the cloth simulation still might not be as smooth as the AI video.

“It's basically a very stark lighting model combined with a lot of obvious line work on the design of the objects and cartoon shaders on things like the ocean,” one person suggests. “None of that is impossible, it just takes a lot of work if you want anything like that depth of detail across what seems to be an open world”.

Would it be worth the effort? Let us know what you think in the comments below. For more inspiration from real games, see our Indie Game Dev Insider series of features.